


I am come home to you

by lbmisscharlie



Category: The Bletchley Circle, The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco (TV)
Genre: Domestic, F/F, The relative pleasures of solitude and partnership, spinsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-25 20:31:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16205120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lbmisscharlie/pseuds/lbmisscharlie
Summary: Jean contemplates finding a new path.





	I am come home to you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [windinthetrees](https://archiveofourown.org/users/windinthetrees/gifts).



Something startles Jean awake in the night. There’s light streaming in through the windows, which can’t be – 

She stumbles out of bed, rushes to the window, reaches to pull the blackout curtains closed. There’s nothing there. Outside, a street lamp glows bright, which isn’t right at all, except – 

Except it’s San Francisco. The war is long over. Jean heaves a sigh, pressing the balls of her palms against her tired eyes. Awake, she feels suddenly unsteady, her cane hooked over the back of a chair by the door. Making her way back to bed, she tucks in under the covers, looking up at the too-high ceiling above her.

It’s the first time she’s slept in another bed since moving into her flat in ’46. A decade – and before that, being away from somewhere familiar meant London, meant air raids. She’s just unsettled; it’ll clear after they’ve been here a few days. Just in time for them to head home, after the police here no doubt prove as unwilling to listen to a group of unaccompanied women as those in London are, and they have to do the work themselves.

She rolls over, curls on one side. Only ever on her left side, now; the pressure is too much to bear on her bad leg. The pillow smells faintly musty, the air of an un-lived apartment. Jean’s managed worse.

++

In the morning, Millie has a pot of tea on and stands at the kitchen counter whisking eggs when Jean walks in. Jean thinks, strangely and unpleasantly, of the kinds of things people used to say of her when she proved herself hospitable: what a good wife you’ll make someday! 

They’ve long since stopped saying that, that’s for sure and certain. And it’s a terrible thing to say about Millie, too, who grins at Jean when she walks in and says, “I think I’m still in a tizzy from travel,” like it’s the most splendid way she could be. The reason they’re here is serious, but Jean can’t help but feel a bit of Millie’s glee at getting so far away from home. From the library, from mealy-mouthed young civil servants who’ve already decided she’s well and washed-up. 

“There’s a market down the street,” Millie says, holding up her bowl of eggs as proof. “But it’s a good thing we thought to bring some tea with us.” She furrows her brow, comically. When Jean gets a cup poured, she agrees; cupping her hands around the mug and lifting it to her mouth is enough to settle the slight agitation still fluttering in her chest.

She lets Millie make breakfast. Her inclination is to help, to step up next to her and see what else needs preparing, but Millie is, if not domestic, then eminently capable. 

Indeed, Millie dishes up two fluffy omelets and sits across from Jean. She wears a dress today, not trousers, and the curls of her hair fall softly. Jean’s never changed her own hairstyle, a firm roll serving her very well, thank you, but she can appreciate the way the styles have grown gentler since the war. Girls would stay up half the night decoding, then another forty minutes pin curling when they could very well be sleeping. Millie’s never quite reached the heights that some of the other girls achieved – fat victory rolls the size of a soup can! – but they did have the stiffened, lacquered sheen that was so popular.

They’re much softer now, though she’s grown a bit thin about the cheekbones. Some days, Jean feels like they all change before her: Susan settled in and tempered down; Lucy a bit more weary and a bit more joyous; Millie sharper, her luminous sparkle grown keen-edged.

It had started, Jean thinks, with that business with Jasper and the Magros family of traffickers. Millie’s edges, that is; the others have their own shocks and joys and compromises to claim.

Millie has lived within the law since then, no more black market business. It’s hard to say whether it’s that – the giving up of it – or the kidnapping itself that has left her with so much sharpness. Or, indeed, if it has always been there, honed simply by months of boredom. 

Jean sets it aside, this thought, and picks up her fork. It doesn’t do to dwell on how little life asks of them, these days. 

++

It’s only natural that Millie would want to stay. It makes firm, perfect sense, in fact. She has a rightness here that Jean can’t herself feel: Millie has always been suited to the sorts of places where people follow hope, in ways in-between and sideways. Places where one can get lost and find themselves again, in a wink or a traded glance. The subterfuge and midnight-oil thrill of Bletchley; the black market perfume-soaked parties that Jean has attended, once or twice, as her guest; the bars Jean knew existed, but never went to herself. 

Only once has Millie mentioned such places to Jean – a careful hedging mention of the Gateways, of seeing there a woman they both knew from the war. It had confirmed for Jean something she had always known about Millie, about herself: that they were the same, in a way, and not in so many others.

Jean has never been to the Gateways. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she did go, for she feels certain the things others seek there are not things she wants at all. 

Her home, her life, her bed are her own, and that brings her pleasure. In strangers’ company, on the other hand, she finds little. Even at Bletchley, with all the fondness she found in her friendships with some of the girls, connection was slowly formed and hard-won, with the distance of her age and rank and pleasure in solitude not easily bridged. It is, at times, difficult to be so resolutely solitary; yet, no pleasing alternative has presented itself.

When Millie tells her that she means to stay, though – it feels suddenly and sharply like Jean has lost something. Like a token in her pocket she’d come to rely on then, one day, found lost when she reached her hand in. 

Millie brings it up again when they’re back at the house, the police having done their duty and the case done and wrapped. Warm and somber from the shared drinks and shared stories at the bar afterwards, Jean feels heavy on her feet. 

“You could stay, too,” Millie says, her voice hoarse and rough from smoke and drink and so much chatting. Her voice always has a rasp to it, an edge grown so familiar that Jean sometimes thinks it could cajole her into anything. Tonight, roughened and quiet, it carries little of Millie’s usual joy. 

Her voice, Jean thinks, heard around the frame of a door as she comes into eyeshot, or across a staticky telephone line, or calling out in joy or fear: Jean will do nearly anything for Millie’s voice.

But what she asks – what she asks sends a shiver of fear down Jean’s spine in a way no other word she’d ever uttered has. Jean can therefore only assert that she’ll go home. Back to her flat, her life, her bed. It’s the only answer she can give, the only one that makes sense.

“Say you’ll think about it,” Millie says, not willing to give up.

“I’m not that adventurous,” Jean says. Millie’s curls have fallen loose, limp, and there’s a sharp furrow between her brows. Jean wants, quite suddenly, to smooth it, to brush her thumb across Millie’s skin, to gentle away the creases around her mouth. “I’m to bed,” she says. 

As she passes, Millie reaches out and captures her wrist. “You could be,” she says, quietly, like that’s the last word she’ll give on the subject. She doesn’t know what she says, Jean thinks, doesn’t know what taking that adventure would mean for Jean. Easing her wrist free, Jean merely gives a small shake of her head and goes to the stairs.

++

It is, of course, not the last conversation they have on the topic, as Edward’s intransigence sends Millie to the want ads. She reads them aloud, as though hearing about the pokey little places available will make Jean want to stay. Instead, with each of them she thinks about the comfort of her own flat in London, made up just so, and of the comfort she and Millie have built here in Edward’s lovely – and apparently soon to be renovated – house. 

They fit well together, here. Not that they keep any sort of schedule – any hope of that developing before Jean leaves was snuffed by Iris and Hailey’s friend dying and thus the odd hours of a new investigation. But it’s comfortable: they alternate knocking up food and refreshing the teapot without discussing it and they each have a favorite seat on the sofa where they rest, not quite touching, in quiet moments. It’s nice, Jean will admit to herself, to have someone to say goodnight to, someone to hear through the walls as she goes about her evening routine, someone to keep her from living only in her head. 

Not just someone, she corrects herself: to have Millie to say goodnight to, to hear, to listen. It seems important that it’s Millie who sneaks into her thoughts so comfortably. Jean’s fond of her – no, Jean loves her, of course she does; Millie is one of her closest friends, perhaps the person she sees the most besides her coworkers these days. Even in their little group, it hadn’t always been that way; at Bletchley, she’d felt closer to somber Susan, but of course Susan is far away from London now. 

Going back to London without Millie telephoning up for drinks every other week, or showing up at Jean’s flat with a tin of biscuits, seems impossible. And yet – staying here, as Millie continues to suggest, seems just as inconceivable. 

Out on a country road – yet another fruitless lead – Millie nearly shouts at Jean. “You’re living a life already written,” she says, and Jean steps back with the force of Millie’s words. 

“We’re different,” Jean says, saying aloud something that’s been between them for ages. Millie reaches for communality, but just because they’re both inclined towards women doesn’t mean they’re the same. “We want different things.” Millie frowns, mouth pursing up in frustration. “We take different roads to get there,” Jean says, more softly, and gestures at the road they stand on. It works; Millie exhales, expression clearing a mite, and lets the argument defuse. 

In the car, as Jean drives and tries to manage staying on the right side, Millie says softly, “I don’t mean your life is bad. Just that I think you want more and I –” her voice catches; Jean wills herself not to look over – “I want you to have it. Whatever you want.” On the steering wheel, Jean’s knuckles tighten. What she wants: she could have said it, definitively, only weeks ago. She’s not so certain now. 

What she does know is that if she lets cracks begin, she won’t stop the torrent of wanting. It’s been that way before: once as a girl, knowing she only wanted University even though that wasn’t what girls of her family did; and later, with Margaret, wanting things she thought she could be brave enough to take, a home and a partner, until Margaret wasn’t brave enough with her.

She’s tucked that away, but she can feel it start to leak in, every time Millie’s hand brushes hers when handing over a teacup, every time they come to the same conclusion together after hours poring over evidence, every time she hears Millie tossing in bed, unable to sleep.

Her steamship ticket is booked, and she’s pushed it back once already. Daydreaming won’t change that.

++

Two nights before Jean’s to leave, Millie comes down and sits next to her on the sofa wearing a new pair of silk pajamas bought in Chinatown, deep jade green with brocaded patterns all over and little frog closures right up to her neck. Heaven knows when she found the time for shopping, among the hours of driving and checking mileage and coming up nowhere. They won’t be off to bed anytime soon, not without a killer pinned down and Iris’s friend still in the psychiatric hospital, but Millie in her new pajamas seems right somehow. 

Millie draws her feet up under her, unself-conscious. Her ankles are pale and slim, knobbly around the bone, and close enough for Jean to touch. She doesn’t but – but Millie, with a great look of concern, reaches over, suddenly, like an impulse, and takes Jean’s hand in her own, enveloping it. 

“You would tell me if you were feeling unsteady, Jean? You would?” The word seems carefully chosen, though Jean can’t know if that was Millie’s intention. Shaken – poorly – afraid: these she would all firmly deny, but unsteady carries with it a sense of the momentary, a familiar waver, the need to lean a bit more on her stick or, indeed, her friend. 

She searches to see if that unbalance exists. It wouldn’t be unreasonable: she did have a gun pointed at her earlier and the man holding it in unpredictable desperation. 

Millie’s hands are warm around hers. At their combined weight on her lap, she feels something pull at her gut, as if demanding attention.

“I’m not,” she says. “Really, I’m not.” And she isn’t, not about the events in the woods earlier. Only – only Millie’s hands around hers, on her lap, makes her feel so steady and careful, so moored, and so like she might topple over solely from the force of the thing tugging on her insides, toward Millie.

“I am, a bit,” Millie admits, and leans toward Jean. She doesn’t quite touch their shoulders together, her tucked up feet keeping her too upright, but the gesture is implied.

Jean cannot respond, doesn’t know how. On top of the pile of their clasped hands she places her free one. Its palm doesn’t quite cover Millie’s, whose hands are long, graceful and assured as the rest of her. 

Millie looks at her, looks her full in the face, and the small tip of her tongue swipes over across her lower lip, and Jean feels a tugging on her hands that she thinks, at first, is Millie pulling away before she realizes it’s Millie pulling them together, shifting her weight to lean closer to Jean, and it’s long, so long, that moment, and a knock sounds on the door.

“I’ll –” Jean says, not fully finishing before shoving off the sofa arm to stand up, hands pulled away from Millie so fast that it feels like that thing in her gut has been sharply yanked, a fish hook pull.

++

She’s thankful that they have murder to discuss while she’s packing. It keeps her mind off other things, things that – god help her – feel more pressingly distressing. Like the way Millie sits on the windowsill, leaning forward so intently, and how much Jean will miss her. 

They come to an impasse on the case, but Jean still has clothes to fold and tuck away. Millie says nothing for a long while, ankles swinging and heels gently clacking against the wall as she thinks. Jean can tell when Millie’s thoughts shift from murder to the steamer trunk on the table and all it represents: her legs stop swinging, she heaves a deep breath, and her gaze moves from staring blankly at the floor to looking at Jean, head cocked sideways. 

“You’re already well equipped for San Francisco,” she says, voice carefully light. “All that fog, all those woolen layers.” 

Jean shakes her head, but can feel the corners of her mouth start to tip up despite herself. She’d never look anything but stuffily British here, but then, she looked stuffy in Britain, too. “You’re trying to charm me,” she says, looking sideways at Millie as she tucks the sleeves a blouse in. 

“Is it working?” Millie asks. Unexpectedly, there’s no coyness to her voice, just a sort of fond softness. Jean swallows. It is, perhaps, working a bit.

Millie’s leaving – or Jean supposes, Jean’s leaving Millie – will hardly be the first time one of their group has backed away. Yet, Jean knows even as she thinks it that her own refusal is nothing like Susan’s – either time – or Alice’s strong-mouthed protests in jail, or, indeed, Iris’s firm words only days ago. Fear drives them all, but in the others she’d easily seen the kind of desperate, clenching, protective fear that caused them to draw tight around their children, their families. Jean feels no such desperation, only and unnamable unease. A sense that should she agree that yes, she wants to leave England to set up here with Millie, to find a new path, should she agree to that, she’ll have to admit that there are other things, perhaps, that she wants. 

“I’m not sure,” she says, honestly. She’s stopped, one hand on the edge of the trunk and the other placed carelessly on the pile of clothing yet to be folded. At her admission, Millie stands up, very quietly, and takes the two steps between them. 

Placing her hand on top of Jean’s, Millie says, “You don’t have to be sure,” nearly quiet enough to be a whisper. She holds Jean’s gaze, and Jean is startled to realize that she, for once, has no earthly idea what Millie might do next or, more terrifyingly, what she wants Millie to do next. 

Millie leans in – Millie, so brave! – and touches her lips to the corner of Jean’s, almost enough to be a kiss. “You only need to take a chance,” she whispers, close enough that Jean could turn her head and bring their mouths together. 

Then she’s gone. Rocked back on her heels and letting out a tremendous breath. “I’m –” she starts, then stops and starts again – “I’m away tonight. With the – with Detective Bryce.” It’s a date he wants and they all know it, but unless his idea of a good time is being pumped for information he’s likely to be disappointed.

That is, Jean hopes he’ll be disappointed. That he’ll go home at a modest hour and leave Millie to come home – come back – to Jean. 

“That’s right,” Jean says, more steadily than she feels. Millie leaves to get ready. After her footsteps fade up the stairwell, Jean finally finds herself looking down at the next garment in the pile. 

Her hand had alit on a scarf, one from Millie. Not an off-cast of her own, but something she’d specially chosen for Jean, it was clear, for the most vibrant color on it was a sort of olive green, none of the crimsons and aubergines and ambers that Millie favors. It’s silk, finer than Jean would usually buy for herself, and feels light as air when she picks it up, effervescent like it might simply skip or blow away if she opened her hand. Jean takes a breath and sets it to one side. For what, she’s not sure; it’s only that she knows it cannot be shoved away underneath her clothing in the depths of her trunk.

++

Hailey’s idea of a picnic is not at all what Jean expected. Hailey herself has proven to be far from what Jean expected, so light and cheerful and bright in completely unexpected ways. Jean thinks at certain times that Hailey reminds her of other girls she’s known, at school years ago or at Bletchley, but in truth Hailey is entirely her own person, and impossible not to like. 

It’s perhaps not really fair to Hailey, then, that Jean can only wish that Millie were there with them, helping them rummage up a bonfire on the beach and cook fish stew. She’d delight in it; Jean isn’t sure that Millie was ever a Girl Guide but she enjoys the sort of ingenuity that would inspire a body to cook fish stew in a fire pit. 

When they’re done and Hailey, startlingly, starts to strip out of her clothes and run down the shore toward the water, Jean wants Millie there even more. Hailey’s effervescent joy even as her teeth chatter is half the reason Jean joins her; the other is thinking how Millie will laugh when she hears about it. 

The water is frigid, as cold as any loch, and they only stay in long enough to splash and grin and say they did it. As Jean dries off, she thinks, startlingly, of what Millie would look like, stripped down to her smalls and splashing in the Pacific Ocean. Jean knows enough to assume that Millie’s underthings are much finer than her own, with soft silk and pretty stitching. She also knows enough to know that no matter how he may flirt, Detective Bryce won’t get anywhere near them; the thought of it sends something sharp and nauseating to her stomach.

She may as well name it, she thinks, for she’s a sensible enough woman. Jealousy. That here in San Francisco Millie will find someone, a partner, a lover, who will fill that restless space she’s always held open. That, perhaps, more than anything is why Jean should leave: what a thing to witness. What a thing to have to watch when she’d just started thinking that what she thinks of Millie might be different than how she’s known it since they met, more than a decade ago. 

They have their own flats in London, but see each other weekly – more, often – and Jean relied on those visits, enjoyed them more than perhaps anything else in her life. 

And then: that kiss today. If it was enough to call a kiss. Absently, Jean presses her fingertips to the side of her mouth. 

“Jean, hey –” Hailey calls out just as she tosses a blanket Jean’s way, rummaged up from the back of her car, and Jean startles out of her reverie enough to catch it. It’s woolen and rough against her skin, but it’ll do. They both manage to get themselves covered up enough for decency, though Jean’s hair is a shambles. 

Just as Hailey reverses away from the beach, tires kicking up sand, Jean looks across the bay at the Golden Gate Bridge and makes a decision.

++

After it all, after the whole sorry series of events is out in the light, she arrives home – home, to the house, perhaps home – before Millie. On the table, in all its hulking glory, sits her steamer trunk, packed and closed and not yet fastened, awaiting the clothing on her back and the pajamas, dressing gown, and slippers upstairs before being locked tight and fast. 

Jean opens it. Removes, from the top, the silk scarf in navy and olive that Millie had given her. 

“What’s this?” Millie says as she walks in.

“I telephoned London,” Jean says. “The library. I offered my resignation.” Her supervisor hadn’t sounded sorry to hear it, simply frazzled about replacing her on short notice. Good riddance.

“Oh?” Millie says, breath catching. When Jean looks up at her, she’s not quite surprised to see tears in Millie’s eyes. 

“When I was – when I was talking to Lydia,” Jean starts, trying very hard not to think of the way her heart pounded, knowing every word would count in coaxing Lydia away from the cliff’s edge, “I was telling her about knowing what I did at Bletchley, in my heart. That even though no one else saw it, I knew what I was capable of.” She looks down at her hands, where the silk scarf trembles. Steady in a crisis, she thinks, until it’s involving her own self. 

Millie steps forward, reaches like she’s going to take Jean’s hands, doesn’t. “Wonderful things,” she says, simple. “You’re capable of wonderful things.”

Smiling, a bit shakily, Jean looks up. “That’s what I realized. You saw it. You see it – see me – every day. In a way no one else has. You – that’s very precious to me.” 

“Oh, Jean,” Millie says, in that way of hers. She does take Jean’s hands, now, clasping them around the scarf. Her hands are warm, her fingers strong. “It’s precious to me, too,” she says, “it’s – oh –” She surges forward, but this time Jean meets her halfway, their kiss too awkward by half but their hands held steady and firm between them. Millie pulls away first, and laughs breathlessly, delightedly, and says, “Shall we try that again?”

“Oh yes,” Jean says, “many times.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from May Sarton's "Fruit of Loneliness":
> 
> Now for a little I have fed on loneliness  
> As on some strange fruit from a frost-touched vine—  
> Persimmon in its yellow comeliness,  
> Or pomegranate-juice color of wine,  
> The pucker-mouth crab apple, or late plum—  
> On fruit of loneliness have I been fed.  
> But now after short absence I am come  
> Back from felicity to the wine and bread.  
> For, being mortal, this luxurious heart  
> Would starve for you, my dear, I must admit,  
> If it were held another hour apart  
> From that food which alone can comfort it—  
>  **I am come home to you** , for at the end  
> I find I cannot live without you, friend.


End file.
